THE HERO OF THE PRE-WAR GENERATION IN THE PROSE OF L. D. RZHEVSKY ("TWO ON A STONE”) AND B. I. BALTER ("GOOD BYE, BOYS!”)

The purpose of the work is to identify the typological features of the hero of the pre-war generation, represented in the novellas “Two on a Stone” by L. D. Rzhevsky and “Good bye, boys!” by B. I. Balter. The academic novelty of the study consists in the absence of a comparative analysis of this type of hero in the prose of Soviet authors and emigrants of the second wave. As a result, it was found out that despite the existing ideological differences between the authors, the hero of the pre-war generation of L. D. Rzhevsky and the hero of B. I. Balter have a number of similar features (a sense of freedom and overcoming attempts to limit it; a surprisingly acute perception of time; the desire for truth and increased vulnerability in personal relationships). Russian literature is characterized by the dissimilarity of the main characters’ fates (the Rzhevsky displaced persons camp, the war and the post-war realities of the USSR), which does not negate the internal kinship, which confirms the thesis of the internal unity of Russian Soviet and Russian foreign literature, which leads to the crucial problem of modern literary criticism in the search for axiological constants that ensured the unity of Russian literature despite the ideological and political upheavals of the 20th century.